Social Media

Social media includes social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Blogs, Pinterest, Google+, video sharing sites such as YouTube, and photo sharing sites such as Flickr.

Social Media Guidelines

Augsburg has published social media guidelines. These guidelines are available in the Employee Handbook, and can be found on the Human Resources Moodle community. Please read the guidelines, and follow them whenever you use social media when you are acting officially on behalf of Augsburg. Faculty and staff also should be mindful of other Augsburg policies.

Before You Start

According to recent research commissioned by Augsburg, the official Augsburg website is the primary place prospective students and their families go to learn about Augsburg and its academic programs. With this in mind, and because departments have the ability to easily update their area of the website, priority should be given to maintaining and building these areas of the websites before considering or adding social media to a department’s workload.

Social media is very time-consuming, and a very public activity. Before your department decides to add to its responsibilities, ask the following questions:

Who will be responsible for posting, monitoring, and maintaining our presence? How will we handle comments that potentially are negative, critical, and/or damaging to the department and Augsburg?

How will we build awareness that our department has added new communications tools to its offerings? What strategy will we use to build our following in social media?

Who will serve as our department’s social media administrator with the responsibility of daily monitoring of our social media outlets to be certain posts are responded to in a reasonable time, to remove comments determined inappropriate according to the Social Media Comment Policy (below), and to post regularly to the site to drive engagement?

First: Contact your LFC

After working through those questions, please contact your LFC (Liaison For Computing) before you open any social media accounts. Your LFC will help your department get started by establishing a social media email account, creating an official department page, and assigning administrators.

This is a critical step because it allows Augsburg to:

Remove individual administrators from the site if they leave Augsburg, thereby retaining the integrity of the page and ability by others to continue to use the page going forward.

If you have a social media site that already exists, please contact your LFC. Your LFC will request the email address associated with the site, and the password. In the context of Facebook, your LFC will request he/she is made an administrator.

Facebook Recommendations

The Marketing and Communications Division has tools in place for your use in social media to help provide a branded look to your department’s social media pages, especially Facebook. After working with your LFC to establish your Facebook page, please:

Adopt, adapt and post the Social Media Comment Policy (below) for your department’s Facebook page. After adapting the policy by adding your department name and your department’s Facebook administrator, post the policy as a “Note.” This policy gives you clear authority to remove comments posted on Facebook that are harassing, discriminatory, and off-topic. A link is provided in the policy to help you more easily understand how to add a “Note” to your department page.

MarComm has developed some branded profile and cover images designed for use on Facebook and Twitter, but appropriate for other social media platforms as well. You can request a customized profile image for your department based on a template. Academic or administrative departments will use the Cross A; athletics and student organizations will use the Spirit Mark (Eagle). A number of branded cover photos are available on Augsburg’s primary Facebook page. Simply select an image, save it to your desktop, and then upload it to your Facebook page.

“Like” other official Augsburg pages. Doing so will help raise awareness of Augsburg as a whole, cross-pollinate information from across social media outlets, and show visitors to your Facebook page the network of pages for the community. Many of the university’s official social media accounts can be found through the “Likes” area of Augsburg’s primary Facebook page, and through a list compiled by the Athletics Department.

Suggested Facebook Comment Policy

Update this Facebook Comment Policy for your Department Facebook Page. Then post it as a “Note” to your Facebook page. For information on creating a note, please visit this Facebook Help Link.

Thank you for connecting with Augsburg’s [Name of Department] through social media.

We encourage our students, alumni, faculty, staff, and our community to use and enjoy this Facebook page, and hope you’ll post to our Wall about your latest Augsburg-related news and ideas.

To keep this a place that all Auggies want to visit, we ask you to keep it civil and focused on topics that relate to Augsburg. We don’t want to stifle discourse, but we do want to foster respectful dialogue.

Augsburg primarily uses social media applications (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Pinterest) to present news and information relating to Augsburg, the community, and higher education. We encourage you to submit your questions, comments, and concerns, but please note this is a moderated online discussion site and not a public forum.

Once posted, Augsburg reserves the right to delete submissions that contain vulgar language, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive comments that target or disparage any ethnic, racial, or religious group. Further, Augsburg also reserves the right to delete comments that:

are spam or include links to other sites;

are clearly off topic;

advocate illegal activity;

promote particular services, products, or political organizations;

infringe on copyrights or trademarks;

use personally identifiable information;

We recommend you not share any of your personally identifiable information on our pages.

Please note that the comments expressed on this site do not reflect the opinions and position of Augsburg. If you have any questions concerning the operation of this online moderated discussion site, please contact the page administrator, [Name/Contact Information of Administrator].